by Larry Tye
He did have a heart. He also led a more princely life than ever, which some saw as fitting for America’s new royal family. He was driven to work in his powder-blue convertible by Clyde Herndon, a government-supplied chauffeur who, when he wasn’t driving Bobby, sometimes took the Kennedy kids for ice cream. When Bobby brought to work his beloved Brumus, the black Newfoundland who was the size of a pony and could drool at will, he let nature call in the courtyard and trusted that the guards would clean up after him. A wood-paneled elevator reserved for the attorney general and anyone he gave a key to whisked him to his office, where, if he felt moved, he could settle in to the private apartment with its sitting room, bath, shower, bedroom, and kitchen with its own chef. Other retainers ensured a supply of laundered dress shirts (often still with frayed collars), and to feel fresh he changed his three or four times a day and sometimes took another shower. His front office was almost big enough to be a football field and he relaxed by tossing one during meetings, which ensured that staff members learned to catch it. Darts were lobbed absentmindedly toward a board tacked to the wall.*15
The offices were ideal for receptions, too, and one winter afternoon Bobby was hosting students from abroad. He and Ethel were on the way in the limousine when they passed the syndicated columnist Mary McGrory emerging from a Justice Department interview. “Are you coming to my party?” Bobby bellowed through a rolled-down window. She needed to get back to work, she explained, and kept walking down Tenth Street. Seconds later the attorney general was on the sidewalk, scooping the middle-aged McGrory off the ground and hoisting her over his shoulder. “You are coming to my party,” he roared as he carried her back up the steps of his building. Were it anyone else she might have called it assault, but with Bobby it was fun, and the story quickly made the media rounds.
One person who didn’t appreciate the informality—especially the darts that sometimes missed the board and the dogs that weren’t supposed to be in government buildings—was J. Edgar Hoover. “He was like a child playing in a Dresden china shop. It was pure desecration,” railed the FBI chief, who favored starch in his white shirts and a greasy tonic slicking back his hair, and lamented the day he’d encouraged Bobby to take the job. “Desecration of government property” and “the most deplorably undignified conduct…ever witnessed on the part of a cabinet member.” Ethel made clear what she thought of Hoover and his quibbles. Knowing how much he despised Los Angeles police chief William Parker, she cornered Hoover at an office Christmas party and asked, “Don’t you think Chief Parker is a wonderful man? Don’t you think that if you ever retired, he’d be the man to replace you?” The beet-red G-man stammered, “Yes, Ethel.”*16
More so than his dartboard, the way he used his desk reflected how Bobby worked and thought. Made of mahogany, it weighed three hundred pounds and looked like a railroad boxcar without the wheels. The desktop was nearly big enough to play Ping-Pong on. Its original user was Amos T. Akerman, the second of five attorneys general appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant. Archivists excavated it from a government warehouse at Ethel’s urging. Bobby kept the bottom drawer empty and open so he could prop one foot on it, with the other on the desk or under his other leg. At birthday parties and other special occasions he climbed atop it to give his remarks extra emphasis. Several phones sat on the desk—a red one installed upon Bobby’s arrival that went directly to the White House, a standard line, and a third unit routed to the FBI director. That last phone became a bone of contention when the attorney general made clear he wanted Hoover himself, not his secretary, to answer it. Next to the phones were a pair of mementoes with special meaning: a dented helmet worn by a U.S. marshal during the race riots at the University of Mississippi, and a rifle taken from a dead Vietcong. Pointing to the helmet and rifle, Bobby would tell visitors, “These are two things we have to watch.”
Skeptics inside and outside the government were watching him. They felt he got the attorney general’s job merely because he was the First Brother, and they couldn’t get past their earliest bad impressions. “I just don’t like that boy, and I never will,” former president Harry Truman confided to his biographer after taking Attorney General Kennedy on a tour of his library in Independence, Missouri. “He worked for old Joe McCarthy, you know, and when old Joe was tearing up the Constitution and the country, that boy couldn’t say enough for him.”*17 Now the doubters had a record to check, and a surprising number grudgingly conceded that seldom, in memory or in history, had there been an attorney general better at rallying not just his troops but the nation. Staff morale had soared. By ignoring its rules he had managed to harness the federal bureaucracy in a way few cabinet secretaries could. Americans who barely knew there was a Department of Justice now heard and cared about its battles to uproot organized crime, turn around juvenile delinquents, and unmask corrupt politicians. Half a century later, nearly all of his surviving band of brothers say working for Bobby was the high point of their professional lives, even when those lives later included becoming attorney general themselves. “He maybe the best,” says Katzenbach, Bobby’s successor. “He was absolutely unwilling to believe you could not solve problems of employment, poverty, that you could not solve problems of education….The fact that he might not succeed never deterred him. He didn’t not do something because he might not succeed.” Even the irascible Truman seemed to be coming around: “They say young Bobby has changed for the better…and maybe he has.”
There were overreaches, as with the Hoffa and Cohn cases. But over the years Bobby’s mythos would grow to the point where he became a model for successors to his right and left. John Ashcroft, President George W. Bush’s arch-conservative attorney general, renamed his headquarters the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building and praised Bobby for the way he’d “arrest mobsters for spitting on the sidewalk.” Eric Holder, President Barack Obama’s ultra-liberal attorney general, cited Bobby as his inspiration for believing the department “can and must always be a force for that which is right.” Kennedy’s most glaring Achilles’ heel going into the job was a reputation for trampling on civil liberties when he was a congressional investigator, and the American Civil Liberties Union continued to oppose him on issues such as his reach for more wiretapping authority. But Francis Biddle, a venerated liberal and civil libertarian who had served as FDR’s attorney general for four years, saw more hopeful signs than disquieting ones in the young attorney general, even on eavesdropping. “I should have been happy, looking back,” Biddle wrote Bobby in January 1962, “to think that I had done as much for civil liberties when I was Attorney General as you have done in your first year.”
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BOBBY HAD LESS time for life outside work during these years, with the strains of being a cabinet secretary and perpetual travel, overseas and cross-country, and he regretted the hours away from his family. The first creases appeared on his forehead, and his mop of straw-brown hair showed flecks of gray. But for Bobby, each new child added to the fun of being a parent—a good thing, since by the time he left office he would have eight, with a ninth due shortly. He did well enough with them as infants but, like many dads, he related to them best when they got old enough to play games that he understood. Ethel loved them as little babies and loved having babies with Bobby, although she teased him with this postscript to her before-supper prayer: “And please, dear God, make Bobby buy me a bigger dining-room table.”
She got not just a table but a whole new wing with four bedrooms and a formal drawing room, along with a barn furnished with paddocks for the horses and a bathhouse that doubled as a movie theater. Hickory Hill was becoming a virtual country club and amusement park, much like Hyannis Port, letting the Kennedys have fun without having to expose themselves to the public. It was a casual brand of beautiful, built with children in mind, down to the pint-sized toilets and sinks. There was a big swimming pool for adults and bigger kids, a small one for the toddlers, and for everybody a Coke machine that dispensed free soft drinks and a jukebox that
generally blared at full volume. The pool house had a kitchen as well as separate changing rooms for men and women, each the size of a gymnasium locker room. Ethel smashed tennis serves at anyone who was game. Five swings and a rope ladder let Bobby test how high he could push Kathleen, Joe, and Bobby Jr. as they yelled, “Higher, go higher!” When it rained, the games continued in the wood-paneled playroom, which had dolls along one wall and at the other end a huge terrarium. Sam Adams, a friend from Milton Academy and Harvard, remembers the scene a day after Bobby’s swearing-in at the Justice Department: “Sinatra kept calling to find out what was going on, and getting the cold shoulder. Kim Novak was here being very attractive. We played touch football in four inches of snow and did some tobogganing. Bobby asked who wants to go horseback riding, and Novak and I volunteered. We weren’t a block away when Dave Hackett called, ‘Hey Bobby, your brother is here.’ The president got on a toboggan and ended up in the bushes, with his bad back, but he survived it.”
The compound was never empty. Pop star Andy Williams might be there with quarterback Don Meredith. The satirist Art Buchwald stopped by regularly, John Lennon less often. Ethel called celebrity guests “sparklies” and funny ones “jollies.” Bobby collected people, and ones who never would have fit in elsewhere did at his estate in McLean. Staff from Justice came, too, but only when invited and often mixing a swim in a borrowed bathing suit with talk about the latest Hoffa probe. CBS’s Roger Mudd, one of Bobby’s favorite journalists, remembers his first visit, in 1963: “Ethel was at the door, making sure we met those of her children who were old enough to be up. When she introduced me to Bobby Jr., then nine years old, he exclaimed: ‘Roger Maris!’ ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Roger Mudd.’ ‘Oh,’ he said.” Mudd recalls, too, weighing how to address the attorney general. “ ‘Mr. Attorney General’ or ‘Attorney General Kennedy’ was cumbersome; ‘General’ was correct but sounded inaccurate and misleading. So, before I started our first interview, I asked the attorney general what I should call him. He said, ‘How about Bobbsie?’ ”
Names had always been serious business for the Kennedys. The president was still Johnny or Jack to Bobby and his siblings, but only in family settings. In public, Bobby used the more respectful “Mr. President” and pressed the others to follow. Journalists started calling JFK by his initials as soon as he was elected president, which was an unusual sign of intimacy. Not long after, they took the unprecedented step of substituting RFK for Bobby. Reporters balked, however, when the attorney general’s publicity people tried to get them to use Bob instead of the more breezy Bobby. Ted called him Robbie; Bobby returned the gesture with Eddie. To Ethel, he always was and remains Bobby. Staffers who were friends, like Seigenthaler, or of nearly comparable rank, like Katzenbach, used Bob. Lower-level government workers turned to the titles that Mudd found ponderous, mainly Mr. Attorney General. Jimmy Hoffa called him Bob at first, when there was a chance of cordiality, then Bobby, uttered with dripping sarcasm. Lyndon Johnson did the same. Bobby called Hoover by his middle name, Edgar, which Hoover, who was thirty years older, found inappropriately familiar. Each new media profile offered another sobriquet for this unfolding man of myriad parts—from Saint Francis to No. 2 Man, Deputy President, Pied Piper, Hero of Irish Folk Tales, Villain of a Shakespearean Drama, Crown Prince, Tiberius Gracchus, Savonarola in Short Pants, Little Brother, and, with a nod to Fidel Castro’s younger brother and trusted minister, Raul.
Their children’s names commemorated people who had singular meaning for Bobby and Ethel at milestone moments. The oldest, Kathleen Hartington and Joseph Patrick, were in memory of his older siblings who were killed in airplane accidents. Robert Jr. was Bobby’s namesake. David Anthony, the most fragile and most like his father, honored Saint Anthony along with Bobby’s oldest pal Dave Hackett and David Ormsby-Gore, a family friend and British diplomat. Mary Courtney was for the Holy Mother and a college friend of the baby’s mother. Michael LeMoyne took his unusual middle name from LeMoyne Billings, Jack’s buddy who became everyone’s, and his first name from Saint Michael the archangel. The Mary in Mary Kerry was for Jesus’ mother, the Kerry for the county in Ireland. Christopher George was named for the martyred Saint Christopher and for Ethel’s favorite brother. Matthew Maxwell Taylor was for Saint Matthew, author of the first Gospel, and General Maxwell Taylor, a friend and hero of Bobby’s. Douglas Harriman was for Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon and New York governor W. Averell Harriman. Rory Elizabeth Katherine, born after Bobby died, took her two middle names from two of Ethel’s close friends, while her first name is an Irish version of Robert. While Bobby joked about forgetting where all those names came from, Ethel remembered the derivations into her late eighties.
The children were always welcome at the many Hickory Hill cookouts their parents hosted, and they got served first. Bobby manned the grill, where he smothered his steaks with mustard. The Kennedy diet, indoors or out, for guests or family, was as no-nonsense and all-American as it had been when Bobby was growing up: chops and roasts; chicken broiled, fried, or roasted; baked potatoes; salad; and, on Fridays, chowder thick with clams, the way they made it on Cape Cod. Bacon and poached eggs were breakfast staples, and what Bobby ordered even at fancy French eateries. If he was drinking beer it was Heineken. On rarer occasions, he’d indulge in a daiquiri or an old-fashioned. His drink of choice was milk, ideally out of a bottle that had been chilled in the freezer for precisely fifteen minutes.
Politics infused the life of this Kennedy household even more than it had Bobby’s childhood homes. The attorney general brought back to his kids yarns about Jimmy Hoffa and J. Edgar Hoover. Colleagues and journalists were frequent visitors, for briefings and fun. Most dads “go to work, they come home. Home is home, work is work,” recalls daughter Kerry. “But he had a very holistic approach….There were always civil rights activists and Justice Department people at our house, playing football with us, swimming in the pool, coming over for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” To preserve the amiable atmosphere, Bobby fine-tuned an artful maneuver in the water: Whenever a reporter or other guest raised an awkward question, their host would glide underwater, reappearing at the pool’s far end, recovering his wind, and deftly changing the subject.
The after-dark pool parties in particular became legendary. The Kennedy children would climb out of bed in their nightclothes and peek over the hedges at guests arriving in black ties and the little black dresses that Audrey Hepburn made famous in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. One or two tables might be set on a board stretching the length of the pool, daring diners to stay dry. That was a special challenge one night when the guests included John Glenn, recently back from his orbit around the earth; Byron White, named two months before to the Supreme Court; and Harry Belafonte, who had performed at JFK’s inaugural gala. Dancers dipped and swayed to the syncopated rhythms of Lester Lanin and his band. “Suddenly Ethel’s chair, with Ethel on it, slipped quietly into the pool,” recorded Arthur Schlesinger, the informal White House historian who was seated next to Ethel on the plank. “I helped her out from the side; and, while I was still contemplating this, was suddenly (I believed) nudged into the pool myself, carrying Ethel back with me.” Bobby was not the culprit this time, testified Schlesinger, who “found that Bobby’s clothes fitted me perfectly and stayed till five.” Astronaut Glenn was creating his own whimsy on the other side of the pool, scribbling on a paper napkin a message—“Help! I’m a prisoner at the Kennedys’!”—then tying it to a balloon that the wind carried into the night.
Hickory Hill had become the social nerve center of the New Frontier and deliciously fertile ground for Washington gossip columnists. “When Bobby Kennedy sends out invitations to a formal party, they read ‘black tie and snorkel,’ ” joked Senator Barry Goldwater, who knew Bobby from the McClellan Committee and was gearing up to challenge Jack in 1964. It was great sport—and a growing embarrassment to the president, who was sensitive to his own image as rich and spoiled and to his slumping poll numbers.*18 He did not reli
sh seeing headlines like POOLSMANSHIP AT HICKORY HILL splashed across front pages from New York to Rome. This wasn’t how Jack himself socialized. He seldom attended Bobby’s parties, and he rarely invited Bobby and Ethel to the more demure gatherings Jackie hosted at the White House or on the Cape. “Kid,” Ethel explained to a friend who was on her way to the president’s place, “we don’t come over unless we’re invited over.” Schlesinger, a guest at both brothers’ soirees, described the president’s as “chic, decorous, urbane,” while Bobby’s were “raffish, confused, loud.” That was incongruous because Bobby had always been the reticent brother. At Jack’s insistence, he started toning down his gatherings and seeing that his guests stayed dry.
But it was more than pool parties that drew visitors to Hickory Hill in the early 1960s. Bobby knew he lacked the intellectual gravitas not just of his brother Jack, but of the administration’s bigger thinkers such as John Kenneth Galbraith, the Bundy brothers McGeorge and William, and Bobby’s own Harvard- and Yale-trained deputies. During a ski trip to Colorado he and Ethel had attended seminars at the Aspen Institute, where contemporary leaders learned from older, more established sages including Mortimer Adler. Joe had pushed his boys to do precisely that through their dinner-table dialogue and world travels. Why not bring the same spirit of probing and self-education, Bobby wondered, to Hickory Hill and the Kennedy crowd? Nobody had better contacts. No one was more anxious to move beyond the immediate concerns of the office in-box and explore philosophy, antiquity, and literature. He realized he had neither listened nor learned enough in prep school or at Harvard, and he was grateful for this chance at reeducation.
They dubbed the monthly seminars Hickory Hill University. The faculty consisted of Schlesinger, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian from Harvard, and Walt W. Rostow, a former MIT economist now working at the State Department. Speakers ranged from the cartoonist Al Capp to the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin and the ecologist Rachel Carson. Topics could be anything from whether there was a God to why poverty was so persistent. The salons generally were accompanied by dinner and drinks, and they were held at other homes in addition to Hickory Hill. Participants included such top administration guns as Treasury Secretary Dillon, Defense Department chief McNamara, and Edward R. Murrow, the former CBS newsman whom Bobby had forgiven for helping topple Joe McCarthy and who now ran the government’s overseas propaganda agency. At one prophetic seminar in the White House living room, President Kennedy asked the Princeton historian David Donald whether President Lincoln’s place in history would have been assured if he hadn’t been assassinated. While the attorney general typically “confined his role to interrogation,” Galbraith recalled, “you had the feeling that if you were shabby on any important point you could pretty well count on Bobby to come in and press you on it.” The writer and socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore Roosevelt’s oldest child, said the seminars “sound rather precious, but there was nothing precious about those lectures. It was all sorts of fun, that was all.” Not everyone was a fan. Marian Schlesinger, Arthur’s wife then, called them “an intellectual quick fix….No doubt a harmless exercise, but so Kennedyish, the whole of Western Thought in eight hour-long seminars.”
